Soho London, a guide to the area

Soho may well be where you find yourself hanging out late at night in London when you are not quite ready to go back to your hotel. For such a small area, just one square mile in London's West End, Soho occupies a large space in the popular imagination, stubbornly retaining a reputation as London's center of sleaze, despite the fact that very little of its once-notorious sex industry remains. The Soho of today is the upmarket home of media companies, restaurants, bars and is considered to be London's main gay area, including the famous G.A.Y. nightclub.

Soho is where Londoners have gone to party for hundreds of years, it's edgy reputation stretching back to 1778, when the first brothel opened, followed by many more brothels and an explosion in on-street prostitution. The alleyways of Soho remained London's main centre of commercial sex right up until the Street Offences Act of 1959 drove most prostitution off the streets.Providers of sexual services in London had to become much more discreet and the biggest non-secret secret in the city became the Soho "walk ups" - postcards advertising apparently non-sexual services, such as "French Lessons" would be stuck next to open doorways, inviting those in the know to ascend the stairs and knock on the door of flat No. 6 or whatever. It is probably fair to say that, if you actually were a French language teacher, Soho would be a very bad place to set up your business.

London Soho Chinatown

At one point, just after the banning of street prostitution, almost every door in Soho was a walk up and the lack of arrests resulting from this open secret was mainly due to the widespread corruption in London's Metropolitan Police Service. Today, only a scattering of a dozen or so back-alley properties continue to be used in this way, with one or two prostitutes operating out of each separate flat. The standard procedure is that you do, literally, just walk up those stairs and knock on the door of whichever flat's postcard caught your interest. A "maid", usually an elderly lady, assesses whether you are too drunk, scruffy

or otherwise dodgy-looking before letting you in. If you do make the grade, you are invited to sit down and wait your turn, very often joining a queue of several other chaps nervously staring down at their shoes. Once in the bedroom, the sex worker lists her prices and, once you have agreed a deal, you pay before anything happens. In general, the experience will be somewhat rushed and, before you go, you will be asked for a further tip and, then, told somewhat firmly that you must also tip the "maid" on your way out - if you plan on coming back and want to be let back in, you should probably make that "tip" a note rather than a coin.

Of course, these days, actual prostitution is a tiny part of what might be considered to be Soho's sex industry. Rather tame "sex clubs" put on shows that operate strictly within the limitations of British law and a handful of retailers specialize in sexy outfits, sex-play gadgets and racks of porn magazines and DVDs that seem pitifully redundant in this Internet age.

It is now Soho's late night cafes that make this the area that London's night owls gravitate to as the rest of London closes down for the night. The famous Bar Italia on Frith Street stays open until midnight, but Caffè Nero, also on Frith Street, stays open until 2AM most nights but 4AM on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights. The free WiFi in Caffè Nero is extremely useful if you happen to be a wandering travel writer! Prince on Wardour Street stays open until midnight every day except Sunday, when it closes at 10PM

For those with a sweet tooth, the big Häagen-Dazs cafe on Leicester Square stays open until 2am on Fridays and Saturdays, and midnight the rest of the week.